Neurons Gone Wild

One night at Cheers, Cliff Clavin explained the "Buffalo theory" to his buddy Norm:

"Well ya see, Norm, it's like this. A herd of buffalo can only move as fast as the slowest buffalo. And when the herd is hunted, it is the slowest and weakest ones at the back that are killed first. This natural selection is good for the herd as a whole, because the general speed and health of the whole group keeps improving by the regular killing of the weakest members.

In much the same way, the human brain can only operate as fast as the slowest brain cells. Excessive intake of alcohol, as we know, kills brain cells. But naturally, it attacks the slowest and weakest brain cells first. In this way, regular consumption of beer eliminates the weaker brain cells, making the brain a faster and more efficient machine!

That's why you always feel smarter after a few beers."

That complaint aside, at the consciousness level, I do think the multiple agent idea is an interesting framework for thinking about the brain. When I was in middle school, I suffered from paralyzing self-consiousness, which in retrospect was probably due to high levels of anxiety. At that age, I had come to think of my non-stop inner dialog and cacophony of voiceless mental urges as being like an internal parliament. In my later teenage years, number of stressful shocks to my system caused me to enter a period of depression, but I think it also gave me an opportunity to disrupt the mental patterns I had developed. Emergence from that depression, and I think also the inhibition lowering effects of alcohol, gave me a chance to reorganize my mental pattern in a way that gave my "self" more agency, and less to my various urges. Well, aside from my urge to use alcohol, which I would have to come to grips with years later.

I would later have another depressive episode, followed by another period of plasticity where I think I was able to really alter my mindset and habits. These depressions I experienced felt in many ways like an agent that hijacked many of my mental processes that normally felt under control of my conscious self, like my feeling of motivation, my emotions, and my thought patterns, rendering my conscious self frustratingly powerless.

Putting my scientist hat back on, it's tough to tell how much my personal experience and the tidy explanation of some psychological disorders and phenomena indicate a reality of a hierarchy of more or less discrete agencies.

I used a variant of this test that you can perform by yourself, described in this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypKUST0azUQ

I would ask the test just about anything that came to mind. Typically I would 'calibrate' things on the Hawkins scale of consciousness:

http://personalexcellence.co/blog/map-of-consciousness/

At one point I got the distinct impression that the test was messing with me. I asked it point blank if it was intelligent, I got back a 'yes' response. From then on I would deal with it as one might an imaginary friend. At first it was strictly through the test, then by working out a way to 'share' my brain with it.

I initially thought the test was acting as some sort of conduit to another world. Eventually I figured out that it was somehow a part of my consciousness. After a year or so I slowly tapered off on communicating with it through the test, eventually I stopped communicating with it at all.

The experience was incredibly illuminating, I now have an intuitive grasp of my subconscious and how it operates.

It seems like a borderline category mistake to claim that because the components of some system have property P then that system is somehow better fitted to have property P itself. There are exceptions (like P="reliability", or P="speed", thinking of transistors in a chip, perhaps) but in general, it doesn't seem to follow. Few transistors have Turing completeness, for example, but could be components of a system possessing that property. I don't see prima face why Agency should belong to the class of properties that transfer upwards from component to composed system.

Anthropomorphizing neurons by ascribing "selfishness", "adventurousness", and so on to them seems to compound this error in an effort to persuade. I doubt Dennett intends this in the excerpted quote.

Anyway, the "heterarchy of agents" view of mind doesn't need personality-endowed neurons, and has some compelling features which are explained pretty well in the article.

Regards "level 4, the self", though, I wonder how well evidenced a "prime-ministerial agent" type of self is. The article seems to take that on faith versus alternate models such as a set of competing high-level agents that compete or cooperate to occupy the driver's seat. Equating this with abnormal states of affairs like schizophrenia or demonic possession seems a bit facile.. (even disregarding the implied antique three-faces-of-Eve view of schizophrenia.)

Just because there aren't gross changes in behaviour or mentation, how would you know that a single top-level agent is consistently running the show? We're all familiar with mood-swings and role strain, but our strongly held belief in a ruling self makes us attribute these to other factors than agent swap-out. I think it's equally plausible that pathological multi-agency could be ascribed to abnormally divergent agents, rather than the mere existence of more than one top-level agent.

Maybe swapping top-level agents in and out is SOP, and a uniquely privileged Self should be treated with caution as a possible metaphysical fiction.

Author’s note: “If you start this, please read it through. Stopping partway would probably leave you with some very silly misconceptions.”

If I were to be interested in learning more about the ideas and theories that this article inherits from, where would I start?

Regarding exorcisms, one aspect that is not addressed is sometimes external manifestations of demonic activity/presence not explainable (or seemingly not explainable) by biochemical processes.

Now, one can dismiss such claims out of hand if one considers a priori that such occurrences are impossible (i.e. that the super-natural does not exist), and so are necessarily explainable as deceptions, misperceptions, or yet-to-be understood natural phenomena. That's fine, but then care should be taken that one does not vacillate between that position and claiming that no one has ever shown any evidence of supernatural phenomena. Anyway, the latter point is a bit of a nit, but I've seen armchair skeptics make the mistake often enough that it bears pointing out.

In my own life, I have on several occasions observed or experienced some phenomena which seemed to defy laws of nature. With respect to the demonic, I can relate one such experience, from which I must necessarily omit certain details so as to not betray anyone's privacy:

Several years ago, I met someone whom I will refer to as "Jim". Jim suffered from serious mental illness and had been unable to develop an awareness that he had a problem for which medical treatment was necessary (and readily available). I tried to be a good friend, but Jim's life was upside down and he regularly got into (sometimes serious) trouble with local law enforcement. I visited him and picked him up from the county jail on several occasions over the years. As I got to know Jim better, I also discovered he had something of an obsession with "the devil" and demons, as well angels and manual copying of long portions of the Christian Bible.

One evening, Jim seemed to be struggling with an intense episode of paranoia and I went to visit him at his request. Upon entering his apartment, I felt that something was... wrong, very wrong. I couldn't quite figure out what it was, but then Jim spontaneously began to verbally relate knowledge of events in my life which were in no way recorded in digital or physical media (Facebook, paper trash, etc.) – private things, secret things, spanning years before I met Jim (and in precise form) of which I had never spoken. It began with one sudden statement, which startled me, which reaction elicited a pained laugh from Jim. He then proceeded to relate more "secret knowledge". His intense gaze (at me) and manner of speech throughout seemed "detached" from the world around him... for just a moment I was genuinely frightened. I said a silent prayer, abruptly changed the subject, and then hurried him out the door so we could go get a late dinner and coffee. Later conversations with Jim suggested that he didn't recall the incident; I've never asked him how he knew those things. Sadly, Jim disappared some time later, after a failed intervention to get him medical help. If he's still alive, I hope a couple of things for Jim. One, that he will realize he needs medical help to deal with his mental illness, and will avail himself of it. Two, that if he is under demonic influence, then he will meet with a kind soul who is able to help deliver him. I have spoken with a real-life exorcist – I didn't seek him out, I met him in passing – and was told that my experience with Jim was a possible sign of demonic activity though not necessarily possession.

Please note that my relating the above is not my way of "pounding the table" to insist that demons are real. It's a very personal and unexaggerated anecdote offered, for what it's worth, in relation to the idea that exorcisms and experience of the demonic would somehow always relate to "internal" phenomena.